Posted
by
kdawson
on Friday January 29, 2010 @10:59AM
from the music-of-the-exploding-spheres dept.

At the "Cosmology At the Beach" conference earlier this month, Grammy-award winning percussionist Mickey Hart performed a composition inspired by the eruptions of supernovae. "Keith Jackson, a Berkeley Lab computer scientist who is also a musician, lent his talents to the project, starting with gathering data from astrophysicists like those at the Berkeley Lab’s Nearby Supernova Factory, which collects data from telescopes in space and on earth to quickly detect and analyze short-lived supernovas. 'If you think about it, it's all electromagnetic data — but with a very high frequency,' Jackson said of the raw data. "What we did is turn it into sound by slowing down the frequency and "stretching" it into an audio form. Both light and sound are all wave forms — just at different frequencies. Our goal was to turn the electromagnetic data into audio data while still preserving the science.'"

Just in case you may not know this but "Grateful Dead" is the name of a rock band (now currently inactive due to forced retirement of most of the members) they are known for (being a 60s band) Skeletons, teddy bears and wild mixes of colors known as "tie dye".

The GP's presuming that the artist is spending a year dead for tax purposes was a great reference to a very funny piece of literature. Now, you might know that or you might not; in any case, your prefixing your post with "Just in case" does not absolve you from presuming the GP didn't know who the Grateful Dead are.

All the available data do indicate that you haven't read the H2G2 series while in the same time they *do not* indicate that the GP didn't know GD.

Actually, RobertLTux's reply was directed at the AC parent that read "How is this drummer so grateful if he's deceased?" and not zmollusc's post. Also, in a lot of places the Grateful Dead really are practically unknown (here in Sweden the most common reactions to any mention of the dead tend to be either "The what?" or "Oh, I think I heard one of their songs, they're one of those bands that sound like credence (clearwater revival), right?" and any attempts to actually explain further what the Grateful Dead

In a way, what he's doing isn't all that much different from when scientists take pictures of celestial phenomena in the non-visible spectra (X-Ray, IR, etc.) and then "project" them into the visual spectrum so we can actually see what they've photographed. To some extent it's a distortion of reality, but interesting.

The drummer was nowhere to be found. Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend.

The band's manager was profoundly relieved. It meant that for the seventeenth time on this tour the drums would be played by a robot and that therefore the timing of the cymballistics would be right.

There are people in the U.K. willing to face the wrath of the power that be and ship over the CDs of all the radio dramas that the BBC did. Well worth the few extra $$.

There's some sort of export embargo?

Didn't know that.

Use the link to my SlashDot account (somewhere above this text, probably) and we can enter into a deep and meaningful relationship, which I hope will end up in both of us having to take a "year out" for tax purposes. (I'm not in the UK at the moment

Because of arcane copyright law and a few other things, the BBC won't ship their productions outside the U.K. You have to find a willing third party to buy it local and ship it for you. I know there were a couple people with a small side-business doing just that operating off of E-bay.

I don't find these "make music from supernovae/network traffic/monkey population" projects to be too impressive. You could fit just about any input to the appropriate scale and it would come out listenable, if boring.

"Well, it IS sort of a downer that all these civilizations were just wiped out when their sun went nova and consumed their planets, and we feel for our extraterrestrial brethren. But on the bright side, check out this wicked drum solo I got out of it!"

There's no difference in this application than most of the others ever produced. They're all simply frequency shifted time series. Any pseudo-regular simple or complex wave can be sifted to any frequency. Radio-astronomy has been the biggest source so far, though brain recordings have been done. At this point about the only novel application would be taking recorded sound and shifting it up to visual light.

The application I've found that uses amplitude modulation (notes from data points rather than time series wave forms) is Moonbell http://wms.selene.jaxa.jp/selene_sok/about_en.html [selene.jaxa.jp] Musical notes are created from lunar altitude measurements done by Selene.

This was nothing new.The History Channel's show 'The Universe" episode on pulsars & quasars featured this,using the beat from the Vela pulsar.The cool thing was the way Hart integrated the pulsar signal into his composition.